Effortless

On-the-go style is the key for this busy mom.

The scene at Buckley’s Tavern in Centreville is de rigueur: hot cars in the parking lot, cold drinks behind the bar.

In the downstairs pub, a lone woman nurses a glass of white wine.

“You have no idea how relaxing this is for me,” says Carroll Ivy Laurence, a busy mother of two who serves the fashion world as the sales and marketing manager for Cass and Co., a luxury shapewear collection perfect for today’s women: they who go from “9 to jive.”

All around her, men in jeans and T-shirts talk sports, but Laurence, showcasing her effortless style in a chic frock and heels, doesn’t notice that one of these things is not like the other.

She has all the ingredients to be haughty fashion elite. Her resume boasts glamorous jobs with Michael Kors and Anne Klein in Manhattan and a stint in the interior design world with Sue Fisher King in San Francisco, which saw her trauling Europe for decadent design fixtures. Yet she remains down to earth. “I’m headed to a parent-teaching meeting at school after this,” she says with a laugh.

On New York: “I was just this little girl from Delaware, and then all of a sudden, I was out on the runways. It was just like ‘The Devil Wears Prada.’”

Before joining Cass and Co., Laurence did fashion marketing for woman-owned companies. “I have a passion for working with women who launch businesses,” she says. She counted among her clients Houppette in Greenville—“where I get all my little treats”—and Kara James, a luxury Canadian handbag label (Jill Biden just snagged one from Ellie in Greenville.)